Universal scaling dynamics of a many-body system far from equilibrium is a phenomenon documented both in theory and experiment, the mechanisms of which are not yet fully understood. Here, we connect the universal dynamics of a spin-1 gas with rogue-wave like events in the mutually coupled magnetic components of the gas, which propagate in an effectively random potential governed by the nonlinear spin-changing interaction. As a result, real-time instanton defects appear in the Larmor phase of the spin-1 system as vortices in space and time. We investigate the spatial and temporal correlations of these events to find two mutually related scaling exponents defining the coarsening evolution of length and time scales, respectively.